1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to web browsing and more specifically to web browsing using speech and speaker recognition.
2. Introduction
Web browsing has become omnipresent in the last 15 years. Especially in the last 10 years, web browsing has shifted from an almost exclusively desktop setting to an on-the-go, everywhere setting. More and more devices offer web browsing features, including the following devices: personal digital assistants (PDAs), smart phones, television set-top boxes, gaming consoles, handheld video gaming devices, and GPS devices. With these new devices, users increasingly access the Internet with multiple browsing devices. For example, a user can access the Internet with K-Meleon on a Windows XP computer at home, with Safari on an Apple iPhone on the go, with Internet Explorer at work, and with Mozilla Firefox on a friend's Ubuntu Linux laptop. One of the problems with current browser interfaces is that browsers do not recognize that a user often uses multiple devices and multiple browsers and can have preferences for the way he or she works with a particular device or browser. In other words, browsers are not currently aware of the connection between a user and a device or a user and a browser. For example, a person uses Internet Explorer on multiple work computers in one way and uses Firefox at home on a desktop and a laptop in different way. Today's browsers are disjointed and operate separately one from another, which leads to user annoyance and frustration. Users are unable to maintain consistency in a browsing experience at a user-device or a user-browser level.
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is a way to unify web browsing preferences at a user-device level.